PD Knife Regulation And Policy

In
today’s litigious society no law enforcement
agency can afford to overlook the need for administrative and training
regulations for any weapon, or potential weapon, that police officers
carry. Most police officers today are carrying one or more knives
on their person, in and out of uniform, on and off duty. Police
officers are carrying a knife because it is such a wonderfully versatile
tool: it can be used as a rescue device to extract people stuck
in vehicles; it can be a utility blade used to cut barricade tape;
and for officers who wear glasses that sharp tipped knife is often
used to tighten those tiny screws that hold on the eyeglass arms.
It is also a potential tool for the delivery of lethal force and
as such its use is a waiting target for a liability suit. Law Enforcement
agencies in general expect lawsuits and don’t fear them as
a matter of doing business. However, if the agency is sued for an
officer’s use of a departmentally recognized lethal force
tool for which the department has no
regulations or training foundation it
is realistic to assume that the agency
will have a difficult time defending
itself in court.

The methods by which agencies can minimize their
liability from officers carrying and
using knives vary from prohibiting
the carry of a knife to recognizing its
potential and fully training their officers in every potential use.
Between those two extremes lies a vast area of administrative quagmire
that the average agency has to swim through to find an acceptable
way of dealing with the knife as a law enforcement tool.

As difficult
as those extremes might be to conceive
as reality, they do exist. The Maryland
State Police regulations specify that a “rescue tool” will be issued to each
officer. The section about Rescue Tools contains the following wording: …a
device equipped with a belt clip and…” “…intended
use of this tool is for emergency rescue situations, i.e. cutting
seatbelts at accident scenes or feeing victims that may be entangled
in such an instance by a foreign object.” Further the regulations
go on to prohibit the use of the rescue
tool as a defensive or offensive weapon.
Following that the regulations go on
to list a few more ways that the Rescue
Tool cannot be used.

The Maryland State Police Rescue Tool is manufactured
by Beretta. It looks an awful lot like
an air-weight Beretta folding lock-blade knife. In
issuing such a tool to the troopers the
Maryland State Police provide them with
a valuable tool. In prohibiting those
troopers from using it as a weapon they create a problematic situation:
If one of those troopers needs to use that “rescue tool” as
a defensive weapon and, as a matter of
last resort, does use it then the trooper
has violated the regulations. Using a
departmentally issued tool to defend
yourself, but only being able to do so
if you violate departmental regulations,
tends to leave a negative outlook in
your mind.

The Northglenn Police
Department in Colorado has taken a decidedly
different approach. The Northglenn PD
General Orders, in the section on Use
of Force, specifically addresses edged
weapons. “The use of an edged weapon
should be considered as a defensive weapon
and as an additional tool in a Level
V situation when no other adequate instrument
may be available.” The Northglenn
PD quantifies the varying levels of threat
from one through five with Level V (level
five) being deadly force. To back up
this potential use of an edged weapon
for lethal force the Northglenn General
Orders also delineate what type of edged
weapon an officer is permitted to carry
and mandates that each officer “shall
be certified in Law Enforcement Edged
Weapons Training and receive annual defensive
edged-weapons training.” Prior
to participating in the training a departmental
Law Enforcement Edged Weapons Certified
Instructor must inspect the weapon, and
the officer, upon completing the training
is certified and registered in Law Enforcement
Edged Weapons use.

If you examine the
policy as it’s written, the Northglenn
PD has covered itself pretty well. Not
only does it dictate what types of edged
weapons its officers can carry, it mandates
that properly certified instructional
personnel shall inspect any knife that
officers want to carry and that the officers
must be properly trained prior to carrying
the weapon. Such a training program would
have to be properly structured and documented
with Use of Force addressed in much the
same manner, as it would be in any firearms
training. If the trained and certified
police officer, carrying a knife which
meets the departmental guidelines and
which has been inspected by a certified
staff instructor, uses that knife as
a defensive weapon “when no other
adequate instrument may be available” then
the officer and the agency are protected
pretty well from liability issues. All
of this assumes that the use of deadly
force is justified and that the officer
used it as he was trained.

The examples
set forth above show two different
approaches to efforts departments make
to control edged weapon carry and use
by their officers and how the agencies
attempt to minimize the liability they might
be exposed to. Reading these examples
and recognizing the extremely different
approaches, one might ask, “What
should a policy on edged weapons cover?”

Recognizing that the
use of a knife - be it fixed or folding
blade, straight or serrated-edge, short
or long blade – represents a potential
use of force situation. Where many administrators
get concerned is that if they label that
knife as a “weapon” then
they can’t authorize its use as
a utility tool. After all, you wouldn’t
use your handgun to extract someone from
a burning car would you? How can any
agency authorize the use of a weapon
for other use than what is represented
on the Use of Force Continuum? Labels
cause confusion. “Lawyer speak” scares
those who have to write the policies
that will protect their agency and their
fellow officers. Let’s try to simplify
it some.

To start with a good
knife policy has to be kept in mind when
the department’s Use of Force policy
is developed or updated. A good Use of
Force policy today permits the officer
to use anything available to deliver
lethal force given the appropriate circumstances.
A “Weapon of opportunity” is
anything that officer can grab when his
sidearm malfunctions or isn’t available.
If the Use of Force policy prohibits
the use of other tools such as batons,
vehicles, flashlights, knives, etc. to
deliver lethal force, then the officer
is back in that trick-bag: “I can
defend myself but only by breaking the
rules.” While “normal” use
of the baton, patrol car and flashlight
don’t include use as a lethal force
option, under certain circumstances any
of them can be used to deliver defensive
lethal force and the option to use them
as such should be covered in the Use
of Force policy.

That said, and assuming
that the department’s Use of Force
policy allows for knives to be used as
circumstances dictate, the Knife Policy
must be built to address the knife as
more than a weapon. Calling the knife
a “rescue tool” is perfectly
acceptable and serves to present the
carry and use of a knife in a more community-friendly
image. Some companies manufacture knives
that are specifically designed for rescue
usage, but the blades would be great
for defensive lethal force as well. The
example that comes to mind is Spyderco’s
Rescue blade.

Whatever label the department
chooses, unless it’s going to issue
knives to all
officers and limit them to carrying only
the issued blade, the policy must dictate
what types of knives are authorized for
carry. This section of the policy should
set limits on minimum and maximum blade
lengths, identify acceptable blade material,
proscribe acceptable types of locking
mechanisms, and delineate other desired
features i.e. – side
clip or lanyard hole. By detailing the
characteristics of departmentally authorized
knives the agency can protect itself
from liability caused by officers carrying
low-quality knives that are as much a
threat to the officers as they are to
the suspects when used. Most often this
type of liability is going to be incurred
when the untrained officer carrying a
knife of poor-quality construction manages
to close it on his own fingers. To insure
compliance with this directive, the policy
should mandate inspection by qualified
staff personnel prior to an officer carrying
the tool.

Once
the type of knife authorized is described,
how it can be carried must be addressed.
Though it might be labeled as a rescue
tool, it obviously cannot be carried
into a secure area such as prisoner processing.
Again, this is where the knife proves
itself a unique item and has to be approached
correctly. The Knife Policy should prohibit
the storage of the knife in a patrol
cruiser’s glove compartment or
center console, and certainly it should
never be stored on the sun-visor. The
Knife Policy should dictate how the officer
will carry the knife such as clipped
in a pocket, in a sheath on the duty
belt, or on a lanyard in a pocket. This
section of the policy will largely be
determined by the physical characteristics
the department approves for knives.

The
Knife Policy should mandate training
in the proper carry, deployment, use
of, defense against, and storage of the
knife. This section should specify training
standards such as number of hours and
who may provide such training if the
department doesn’t
have the capability to do so. Such training
should meet all of the same structural
requirements as firearms training as
to documentation, policy review, nomenclature,
etc. as well as providing training in
use of the knife as a utility tool. The
liability suit can come as easily from
an unintended nick delivered to a trapped
driver in a burning vehicle as you cut
his seatbelt as it can from the criminal
you had to cut to save your life. To
protect the agency equally from these
potential situations the training should
cover reasonably expected uses of the
knife both as a utility tool and as a
weapon. For carry regulation, the policy
should state whether the knife must be
carried concealed, on the duty belt,
and how the regulation applies off duty.
If required, the policy should state
that the officer shall carry the blade
off duty, recognized it as a lethal force
tool just like the issued firearm.

Finally,
the Knife Policy should dictate what
documentation is required of the
police officer should the knife be deployed
and used. Such a reporting requirement
could range from no paperwork for
utility use such as cutting barricade tape,
to an incident report for use as a
rescue tool, to a Use of Force report if the
knife is used as a lethal force option.
The completion of
the different types of paperwork, if
not covered in other training, should
be included in the training program
for the knife.

By
implementing a policy that covers all these items,
a law enforcement agency can minimize
the liability it is exposed to as a result
of its officers carrying and using edged
weapons. Further, agency authorization
for officers to carry and use edged weapons
is often viewed as a supportive action
by those same officers. In other words,
it can be a morale booster if a proper
edged weapons policy is created and implemented.
No matter what type of policy your agency
puts into effect, the bottom line is
that officers carry and use knives. If
your agency isn’t addressing that
in regulation and training then it is
unconditionally exposed to the liability
resulting from an officer’s use
of an edged weapon, no matter what that
use might be.